Thursday, April 27, 2017

V8 Release 5.9

Every six weeks, we create a new branch of V8 as part of our release process. Each version is branched from V8’s git master immediately before a Chrome Beta milestone. Today we’re pleased to announce our newest branch, V8 version 5.9, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 59 Stable in several weeks. V8 5.9 is filled with all sorts of developer-facing goodies. We’d like to give you a preview of some of the highlights in anticipation of the release.

Ignition+Turbofan launched

V8 5.9 is going to be the first version with Ignition+Turbofan enabled by default. In general, this switch should lead to lower memory consumption and faster startup for web application across the board, and we don’t expect stability or performance issues because the new pipeline has already undergone significant testing. However, give us a call in case your code suddenly starts to significantly regress in performance.

A dedicated blog post will delve deeper into this topic soon.

WebAssembly TrapIf support on all platforms

The TrapIf support significantly reduced the time spent compiling code (~30 %).

V8 API

Please check out our summary of API changes. This document is regularly updated a few weeks after each major release.